Affinity Photo for ipad - feedback

Recommended Posts

thank you for releasing the Affinity Photo for the ipad, just bought it and it's awesome. I hope you guys launch Designer for ipad soon - it will be another instabuy ;)

Some small questions and feedbacks:

Any technical reason to not allow "free rotation" of the canvas? Having to select the "canvas rotate tool" to do something as trivial as rotating the canvas seems counter intuitive. For drawing and painting, we need to rotate very often

Please include a setting to enable the "apple pencil only" to draw or paint, meaning, please give us a setting to disable the ability to "stamp the brush on the canvas" with the finger

I love the pixel brush, really perfect for crisp lines, but I guess we need a "pixel eraser" too? When we use the eraser tool, it creates antialiased pixels, defeating the purpose or the crispness. You guys have plans to implement a crisp eraser too?

Any plans for customizable gestures (like one finger swipe up for brushes, one finger swipe down for eraser, one finger swipe right for flip canvas vertically, one finger swipe left for undo, etc) ?

I wish the bottom toolbar can optionally be placed at the top of the screen (or somehow "docked" vertically at the left, below the main toolbar. Also, it is a little big on the ipad 12.9, we will have an option to "scale down" this toolbar to something like 75% or 50%?

We will have the ability to click or drag at the navigator to show another area of the canvas?

We will have the ability to import fonts?

When we reopen a document, the app remember the last brush, but when we open the brushes studio, the panel doesnt open in the correct category, it always open in the default (painting) category

Any chance for a setting to allow the app to "remember" the icons from the left toolbar? Everytime we open a document, the app "reset" the toolbar to the default tools and we need to choose again the "rotate canvas" and "pixel brush" for example

BTW, thank you for the pinnable color wheel, so few apps understand how this is important o/

And again, congrats for this amazing app, you guys really raised the bar on the ipad pro

Share on other sites

Canvas rotation via rotation gesture seemed to happen too frequently and it's quite annoying so we made it only possible in the canvas rotate tool... There's no reason we couldn't enable an option that would let you have it in all tools though... :)

"Pencil input only" sounds like a reasonable request - we're still getting a lot of this stuff nailed down so we can add that one to the list, thanks.

Pixel eraser is also sensible!

Paolo (who makes the DAUB brushes) was in the office with us a couple of weeks ago and he was using 7GB of his custom brushes - so yes, they work great, but we need to add an importer so you can easily get them into the application. This will get done soon.

The gestures would fight with the current ability to paint/move/whatever - but if we added your 'pencil input only' option then there would be no fighting, so yes, we could enable custom gesture recognition to trigger tools or actions...

It wouldn't be totally trivial to add custom scaling for the context bar at the bottom, but it's definitely possible. We're still playing with these things anyway at the moment, so I'd expect this area to evolve over time anyhow...

The navigator will be improved to add 'View points' (customisable view setups that store view centre and zoom level) to help you easily navigate around the document. I'm not totally sure about panning the view around with your finger in the navigator though - perhaps it would work for the pencil, but your finger is often a bit too clumsy to do anything meaningful in that amount of space, I found...

Not too sure about fonts personally, but I was under the impression that you could already install fonts from iCloud Drive? Perhaps not?

Yes, I'd also like to have a persistent tool state between application runs, and we're already doing this for the desktop products, so I'm sure this will also be enabled on iPad

Thanks once again - hope you enjoy using it! I'm sure we'll make it so much better over time :)

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

"Any technical reason to not allow "free rotation" of the canvas? Having to select the "canvas rotate tool" to do something as trivial as rotating the canvas seems counter intuitive. For drawing and painting, we need to rotate very often"

thought so too, but it is surprisingly easy to rotate the iPad itself :D but probably best to add an option just for those who don't want to scratch their tables :ph34r:

please note that syncing adjustments and stuff would be really good now, I mean really :P

Link to post

Share on other sites

Canvas rotation via rotation gesture seemed to happen too frequently and it's quite annoying so we made it only possible in the canvas rotate tool... There's no reason we couldn't enable an option that would let you have it in all tools though... :)

"Pencil input only" sounds like a reasonable request - we're still getting a lot of this stuff nailed down so we can add that one to the list, thanks.

Pixel eraser is also sensible!

Paolo (who makes the DAUB brushes) was in the office with us a couple of weeks ago and he was using 7GB of his custom brushes - so yes, they work great, but we need to add an importer so you can easily get them into the application. This will get done soon.

The gestures would fight with the current ability to paint/move/whatever - but if we added your 'pencil input only' option then there would be no fighting, so yes, we could enable custom gesture recognition to trigger tools or actions...

It wouldn't be totally trivial to add custom scaling for the context bar at the bottom, but it's definitely possible. We're still playing with these things anyway at the moment, so I'd expect this area to evolve over time anyhow...

The navigator will be improved to add 'View points' (customisable view setups that store view centre and zoom level) to help you easily navigate around the document. I'm not totally sure about panning the view around with your finger in the navigator though - perhaps it would work for the pencil, but your finger is often a bit too clumsy to do anything meaningful in that amount of space, I found...

Not too sure about fonts personally, but I was under the impression that you could already install fonts from iCloud Drive? Perhaps not?

Yes, I'd also like to have a persistent tool state between application runs, and we're already doing this for the desktop products, so I'm sure this will also be enabled on iPad

Thanks once again - hope you enjoy using it! I'm sure we'll make it so much better over time :)

Matt

Hi Matt,

thanks for the swift reply :)

about the canvas rotation, sure we can rotate the device, but you know, we are already addicted to do it with 2 fingers without clicking anywhere before, it's really just second nature on the ipad across many apps. Also, we don't want to scratch the precious :)

A cool, permanent rotation like the one we have in comic draw or procreate, where the angle "snaps" if it is very close to 0 or 90 degrees with a smooth small and fast animation will be awesome, I guess the "annoyance" is related to canvas rotated by very small values and not "aligned" with the ipad screen? I am pretty sure is even more annoying to click one tool to rotate, do the rotate, click back on the brush tool, do the brushstroke, click the rotate again, etc etc. Some fluid strokes are tricky to do at certain angles ;)

...You can see my main usage is for drawing and painting, for photo manipulation I guess this is not so much of a problem

Not sure that I understand what you say: "Pixel eraser is also sensible". I am asking for a eraser that behave like the "pixel brush" that do not create transparent pixels at all

(Right now I circunvent this by using a threshold adjustment above the pixel layer and a fully white layer below the pixel layer because the threshold doesn't work if the layer below is transparent)

BTW, there is a way to apply the threshold adjustment *only* to a group of layers? Looks like the threshold is applied for *all* the layers below it. Also, the threshold adjustment doesn't work if I put it *inside* a group of layers?

About the daub brushes, they work 100% if we import them one by one? We only don't have a bulk import, that's it?

About the scale of the context bar, I understand it's a complex problem, just asking because is really big now (200% of the normal toolbar), but I also understand some users may like it so big, so, to each his own :) About the position at the bottom, I guess some users my find useful if we could position it on the top because the context bar is, very often, obscured by our hand and arm... Or maybe the context toolbar can be compacted below the main toolbar.? Maybe you can call it "compact interface" in settings? :D

Easier to show than tell. Sent you a rough mockup below to show what I mean. Just for the kicks I pasted one small interface element from clipstudio where we can swap primary and secondary colors and - of utmost importance - the transparent color. The ability to draw with transparent color is super useful for "sculpt" the drawing without changing tools, we can left the eraser for big chunks of erase and use the transparent color to correct small mistakes using the exact same brush we use for drawing. We will also be enabled to use the pixel brush to "erase" with pixel crispness, without the need to use the actual erase brush tool. I hope you guys implement the transparent color in the future

About the navigator, I agree the pencil will shine there, the finger, not so much

You are right about fonts, I was expecting the app to offer me an option to install them (silly me), I forgot about the whole "profiles" thing in ios, just installed some fonts using the free "Founteer" app - The text studio is really good o/

And the app is amazing, I am loving it, can't wait for ios 11 to see all that drag an drop in action with the app too

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

I just downloaded Affinity Photo for iPad .. I am running it on an iPad Pro. So far it seems terrific except for one thing .. it appears that the import to Affinity Photo is grabbing only the jpeg from my DNG file. (I am uploading on the iPad from an SD card.) When I look at the metadata studio it tells me that my image is 1620x1080. If I look at the image in Apple Photos on the Mac after uploading on the iPad it also tells me that the image size is 1620 x 1080 px but the file size is 44.4 Mb. When I upload directly to my Mac I get the full resolution DNG.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

@RHiNO that ain't gonna fly, on 9inch and especially with larger adjustment panels of some tools

And if you access these controls with your right hand like most do, you actually not only block the adjustments but block your whole image

I believe the "node tool" have the greatest context panel, and it can fits also. Notice the context panel on the quick mockup have gigantic space between the tools now, it can become way more compact, but I am not sure, it's just a small suggestion ;)

About the block, one option is to set the interface in "left handed mode" I guess?

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

… about the canvas rotation, sure we can rotate the device, but you know, we are already addicted to do it with 2 fingers without clicking anywhere before, it's really just second nature on the ipad across many apps.

Indeed. *Please* enable this. Rotating the device should be considered a joke, in my opinion. I guess the easiest way would be enabling the rotation on the basis of the selected tool:

When the standard View Tool is selected and you grab another tool, you would be restricted to zooming the canvas with two fingers. Simply call this Pan Tool.

When the Rotate Canvas Tool is selected from the flyout (remember this selection is already persistent across tool change) and you grab another tool, you would have the two-fingers rotation capability in addition. Call this Pan & Rotate Tool … ;)

So you would basically have the best of two worlds without being forced to create a dedicated preferences option. Wouldn’t that make sense? Well, maybe it would fight against the Tool logic. But anyway …

Please include a setting to enable the "apple pencil only" to draw or paint, meaning, please give us a setting to disable the ability to "stamp the brush on the canvas" with the finger.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Well, there is another option I find sorely missing. Is there a technical reason why we cannot upload documents directly to Affinity Photo through the standard iTunes interface, as it is the case with many other design apps, such as Pixelmator or Procreate? Why doesn’t Affinity Photo appear in the Apps list?

Unless I am mistaken, there is no other way to share .afphoto files to the application other than through cloud services. Now I would guess there are quite a few people who consider local file transfer safer and better than using cloud services. (I fear I am among these people.)

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

I believe the "node tool" have the greatest context panel, and it can fits also. Notice the context panel on the quick mockup have gigantic space between the tools now, it can become way more compact ;)

About the block, one option is to set the interface in "left handed mode" I guess?

I actually think having the filters and adjustments on the right side is better for the same reason as having the bottom part on the left is bad (you cannot see the image anymore), tools on the left make sense cause they are only accessed once while filters are evaluated/ changed based on their affect on the image (on the other hand a pro might just pick the right one and go)

Anyhow, propalby custumisation and custom reordering will come in a future update and this bottom thing will probably not stay like it is, e.g. for apply image this thing is 100% unusable complicated

ABC very much true, but handoff is the new way of doing this without a cable ;) (except for windows users)

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

@RHiNO, Aligning the context bar on a side means sliding up & down instead of left & right to make changes. Since the screen is wider than it is tall, that means a controller's full range has to be mapped to a shorter on screen distance, making it more difficult to set precise values.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Unless I am mistaken, there is no other way to share .afphoto files to the application other than through cloud services. Now I would guess there are quite a few people who consider local file transfer safer and better than using cloud services. (I fear I am among these people.)

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

The gestures would fight with the current ability to paint/move/whatever - but if we added your 'pencil input only' option then there would be no fighting, so yes, we could enable custom gesture recognition to trigger tools or actions...

I'm playing with the iPad app right now at work, and I'm loving the feature set so far. Gesture triggered radial menu, that is customisable (just like in procreate) would be my number one feature request. Working with the iPad app is great, but it still feels a bit hampered, like if I was on the mac version but were not allowed to use hotkeys. I really notice how much I do on the keyboard without even thinking about it.

One little additional question I have is: why not have iCloud sync on affinity files. I was sort of surprised that I had to import my old projects from the affinity photo iCloud folder, then edit there as a copy, instead of just picking up where I left off in the mac and edit, save and then being able to just return to the mac and continue with those new iPad created edits in place. Am i just missing something or is there a good reason not being able to actually work on the same file. In Pixelmator this works flawlessly, but that app hasn't got nearly the amount of power that Affinity Photo has. I've had to use that work flow when I want to edit work files in Procreate too: import them into Procreate, edit them, export them back to gDrive as a new file and then keep working at the desktop. However that is for external files edited in both procreate and photoshop. I actually just assumed that native iCloud sync would be the standard way to work on files.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

You can limit the scope of any adjustment by putting it inside the container - i.e. you asked how to limit it to the group you wanted to affect? The answer is just to drag that adjustment inside the group :)

We already do a 'snap back to the last zoom level if the user hasn't zoomed very much' that's hopefully barely noticeable, so 'snap back to last rotation' would be no problem.

With regards to the file management side of things, I totally agree we have work to do here - it's not as smooth as it should be - we'll obviously try our best to get this sorted out quickly.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

With regards to the file management side of things, I totally agree we have work to do here - it's not as smooth as it should be - we'll obviously try our best to get this sorted out quickly.

Thank you, Matt! I guess such problems will be somewhat mitigated with the advent of iOS 11, which appears to have some sort of “Finder” application, or at least, a place where all files brought to an iDevice are stored, regardless of which app they belong to. Should Apple really have listened to professional users? ;)